In Mr. Lublin's Store

In Mr. Lublin's Store is a novel by the Israeli author Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888–1970, Nobel Prize in Literature 1966).

[1][2][3] He describes the thoughts of a first-person narrator who arrived in Leipzig in 1915 about Judaism, his unnamed hometown in Galicia and his reception in Leipzig, while he is waiting for the return of his host Arno (Aharon) Lublin in his store in the city centre, located in a narrow alleyway named Böttchergäßchen.

It has no plot but follows the stream of thoughts of the nameless first-person narrator, a young man from Galicia who last lived in Jaffa and came to Germany in the middle of World War I.

The second chapter deals with obtaining the residence permit through Lublin's intercession with the official Dr. Paul Bötticher in the New Town Hall of Leipzig.

In the third chapter, two of these small shopkeepers, Witzelrode (antiques) and Götz Weigel (knife sharpener) and the history of their families are presented.

In the eighth (and final) chapter, leaping through time and space, Ya'akov Stern, a character from the first-person narrator's hometown, appears in Lublin's store.

For the Eastern Jewish migrants from Galicia (sometimes called Poland, sometimes Austria, sometimes Russia), Leipzig was an "arrival city" (Doug Saunders) at that time.

[7] At the end of chapter 7, the young first-person narrator, alone in Lublin's store, has a vision that walls are growing and that he will be transported to his hometown.

After World War II, it had to give way to the newly created Sachsenplatz in the GDR years, which no longer exists today and has been developed with the Museumsquartier Leipzig.